


Fools Rushing In

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:24:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"But we didn't plan on loving each other."<br/>"Well, none do."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There was something wrong with Lucien Fairfax.

Garth knew it from the moment he stepped into the study and into the lord’s service, the genial smile and impeccable manners notwithstanding.  
There was something wrong with the place settings at the long dining table, which Lucien let the servants use, because he couldn’t abide it. There was something wrong with the heavy drapes over the windows in his bedroom, drapes that collected pounds of dust because he never had them pulled up and away. There was something wrong with the curve of his spine as he bent over cracked-spine tomes in the midnight hour, the candle’s flame guttering piteously.

Something wrong with the too-bright gleam in those cornflower-blue eyes and the fine trembling in those thin, graceful fingers.

But that was all right. Garth was attracted to fragile things.

Lucien responded well to the mage’s attentions — he ate his meals and took his rests, let Garth do the heavy reading so he could tend to his castle and to his town, and though he baulked from the sun as though it would set him aflame, he consented to short walks through the garden in the cool twilight hour, caressing the fragrant blooms and gazing thoughtfully at the gates leading away from the castle and into town.

But darkness was not so easily quelled.

The flickering of light from the study caught Garth’s eye as he headed for his chambers, and he paused, brow furrowing in irritation. The night was young, surely, but Lucien was not, and it had been a full hour since he’d promised to retire.  
And hadn’t he seemed weary, anyway, shadows under his eyes and a drawn look to his features? Had he fallen asleep at his desk — again?

With a deft flick of his fingers, Garth conjured a small flame to guide his way and strode towards the doors, the sliver of telling light signalling that they’d been left ajar.

“Lucien.” He spoke softly at first, slipping inside the expansive room. And then he looked up and around.

The light he’d seen was not mere candlelight, but a projection — a force of Will combined with a previously-broken piece of machinery that Garth had rigged up as an experiment. How Lucien had gotten it to work was beyond Garth.  
But more than that, how Lucien had gotten it to project his memories of the dead was beyond all rational thought.

In a shivering, translucent, black-and-white rectangle the size of a mattress, Helena Fairfax’s skirts twirled. In her arms, a bundle — little Amelia, barely a month old, swaddled in soft cotton. When she turned, she smiled slowly, as if catching Lucien and Garth watching her — but the look in her eye was for Lucien only.

“Lucien, turn it off.”

He feared what he would see when he approached Lucien’s chair. The man sat slightly slouched, his fingers steepled in front of his aquiline nose, and Garth could see neither agonised grimace nor involuntary tear on his shadowed face.

“Turn it off,” he repeated, softer now.

Helena’s skirts twirled, again and again, rocked Amelia, smiled back at Lucien. Repeat. Repeat.

Garth quietly shot a tiny bolt of lightning at the whirring device, and after a few indignant sparks and wheezes, all was dark and still.  
Helena no longer danced or smiled.

Lucien didn’t budge.

“It is late. We should both be in bed.” Garth’s voice felt thin, ineffective — bullets bouncing off steel.

“I should be dead,” Lucien spoke, softly, and at first Garth thought he’d simply repeated what Garth had said.  
But no… that wasn’t quite the same thing at all.

The silence grew, filling the room and displacing the air, and Garth backed away from it. “I’ll leave you be. But I highly suggest you get some rest. We have work to do come morning.”

He’d barely reached the door when Lucien spoke again. “Do not leave me in this darkness, Garth.”

The mage’s conjured flame guided the two men down the benighted halls, Garth’s hand hovering at the curve of Lucien’s spine, Lucien’s steps shuffling and defeated.  
Garth intended to leave the lord at his chambers, his duty done, his keep earned.

“I said, don’t leave.”

By day, Garth would have been annoyed at being commanded. But by night, the cool authority in Lucien’s voice gave way and revealed desperation, sickness, a weakling grasp on life and its realities.

There was something wrong with Lucien Fairfax, and Garth had known it, and still he’d come.  
He had to see it through.

The bed was immense, and Lucien was swallowed by it — a frail man of three decades and five whose lustrous hair was already showing white at the very roots, whose bones jutted painfully at shoulder and hip, whose hands trembled when he moved to undo buttons and clasps.

“Surely I must repulse you. The cool, collected scholar, no ties to land or family, having dispensed with the need for…” He trailed off, and a soft whump punctuated the unfinished statement as his jacket fell to the floor. The shirt followed shortly, and he started in on the trousers, but gave up on the fastenings and simply sat, heavily, bonelessly, on the side of the bed.  
“I apologise for being brusque. Of course you can leave. I have no right to command you.”

The silence stretched between them again, but before it could overwhelm them both, Garth crossed the room and laid down on the opposite side of the bed, crossing his ankles and arms and settling in as if it were his own.

Lucien remained stiff and still, perched on the edge, and so Garth began to speak.

“In Tir’qun, one is encouraged to marry early. Our lifespans are supposed to be shorter than those of other clans, perhaps because we live so far removed from the other holds that… well, I digress. We marry early to ensure we do not die without having sired or birthed at least one son.  
The woman I married was beautiful, of course, and well-taught. I was… well, headstrong and quick to anger, but what man in Tir’qun wasn’t. Life did not favour the weak-willed.  
We should have been well-matched, unremarkable, toiling until our deaths. But I was… I had other interests that had nothing to do with homesteading.”

Lucien had turned his head, and then his shoulders, to face Garth. Now, the weaving of the tale drew him closer, and he leaned forward as if anxiously awaiting the rest.

“I knew very little back then, compared to what I know now, and I put myself in danger multiple times. But as if that wasn’t enough, I put my one and ours in danger, as well.  
And as if _that_ wasn’t enough, I… didn’t care.  
My one loved me, as much as anyone could, I suppose. I know that. What I don’t know is whether I loved _her_ as much as anyone could.”

Garth stared straight ahead, unblinking, as if trying to see through the fog of the present into the arid deserts of Samarkand, into who he’d been and who he’d become.

“My one and our children are with the Ancients. _I_ sent them there, long before their time.  
So perhaps you’re looking for sympathy in the wrong place, Lord Lucien.”

Silence again, barely interrupted by the whisper of the sheets as Lucien slid closer. Garth studiously ignored this advance, still staring at the far wall.

“I don’t want to be fixed, Garth,” and the mage nearly jumped when Lucien’s cool breath feathered over the whorl of his ear, carrying these softly-spoken words with it. “I don’t want to be pulled from the fire. I want someone to burn with me.”

There was something wrong with Lucien Fairfax, and when Garth didn’t jerk away from that questing, hesitant touch, he knew there was something wrong with him, too.  
And perhaps that was all right. What was already broken couldn’t possibly break twice.


	2. Chapter 2

“There is light, but you still glow…”

Garth holds perfectly still as Lucien’s fingers trace the faintly pulsing patterns — whorls and branches, venous, a bluish road map starkly inked upon dark flesh. Around the temple and under the jutting cheekbone, where the lines are faint and thin, down under the jaw to the column of his neck where the lines widen and intensify, and then the questing path is interrupted by the collar of Garth’s shirt, a simple peasant’s affair of rough cotton with rawhide ties.  
Lucien would have scoffed at such garments on anyone else, but the mage always dressed well when it counted. Here, deep in the castle, in their shadowy haven, the feel of the unfinished fabric is almost exotic.

“Are they… everywhere?” He is back to the neck-lines, tracing over where they converge right above the Adam’s apple, his lips twitching in amusement as Garth swallows reflexively. “These lines… are they?”

After a beat, Garth licks his lips. Clears his throat. “Yes.”

Chuckling, Lucien leans in and replaces fingertips with the lightest brush of lips. Garth tilts his head away, his neck elongating, his gaze clouding. He’d come to gently berate Lucien for being so dependent on his sympathy, hadn’t he. He’d attempted to regain control.  
 _Control._ Lucien is nestled in the valley between neck and shoulder, that curious hand of his slipping down over undyed cotton, down to twine in the fastenings of trousers.  
 _Control._ Garth makes an involuntary sound of denial, back of hand flat against Lucien’s chest, pushing. Heat flickering in his veins like the remnants of a fire spell.

“Have I been presumptuous?” Lucien’s voice is velvet wrapped in silk, cool breath on pulsing Will lines, and his hand has not moved. “I know you, Garth. You’ve lost as I’ve lost, no matter how it happened. And you think you want to be left alone.  
I’m sorry, Garth. I can’t do that…”

His voice — _trickery, all of this, the voice of a serpent rattling softly in the grass_ — trails off on a sigh, and not a sigh of resignation or sorrow but a sigh like a door drifting open, like a body arching upward. That treacherous hand squeezes the traitorous flesh behind the fastenings of Garth’s trousers, one hard squeeze, and then Lucien is sitting up, standing up, and the room materialises around Garth again and he is suddenly acutely aware of too many things at once.

“Where are you going?” Garth hadn’t meant to speak. He certainly hadn’t meant to speak so hastily, so harshly, as if the answer is of the utmost importance.  
Lucien chuckles, because Lucien knows. He chuckles, and his smile is a little pitying and a little brittle, and maybe even a little amused, too, and he’s walking out of the room.

A mere moment escapes before Garth is up like a shot — _centre of gravity off, since when is his centre so heavy, so full of **heat**_ — and perhaps it’s Will that helps him move so quickly or perhaps it’s something else, but Lucien’s shirt is in his fist and he doesn’t protest as he’s jerked backwards, and it’s strange to feel the jutting planes of Lucien’s shoulder blades and spine and hips against him but it’s not a bad strange, no.

Lucien turns — _scent of soap and scented oils in his hair, **such** hair_ — and maybe there’s triumph or smugness in those crystalline eyes but mostly it’s blunt desire, the need to dig nails into flesh and pull close and receive the same treatment in return, the need for harsh passion and rough-hewn tenderness, the need for the heat of the kiss immediately following the sting of the slap.

There’s something wrong with them both, but who can be bothered to care about such trivial matters when there’s the hint of honey-taste on Lucien’s tongue and the merest shift of Garth’s legs is like flint struck against stone and it’s all right if the mage’s rings snag in Lucien’s shirt and Lucien’s lips against those pulsing lines is like kissing lightning…

Lucien is bravado and bluff, but his fingers grow fumbling and anxious as their passion builds, and Garth has to lay him down — _there is the hint of curve, of fullness, a memory of a healthier form, but the pattern of vertebrae undulates like a snake when Lucien writhes against the mattress and that is nice too_ — and in the end it is just friction and the excitement of newness that brings them. Another time, perhaps… another time he will sink languidly into the mattress and open up and Garth will grip his white hips and tremble as he pushes in, pushes in deep… another time, perhaps.

There _is_ time.  
There is something wrong with Lucien Fairfax, but the Spire’s heartbeat has not yet become his own, and the gleam in his eye could just be the flicker of guttering candlelight or maybe the glitter of reawakened lust as they lay sweat-slick and panting on top of the sheets, idly touching, idly.

“We’re broken,” they tell each other with these idle touches, “but we can still pretend, right? If it tastes good, why not drink deeply?

“We’ll never love each other, after all, and if there is no love, there will be no hurt.”

Thoroughly convinced, they do not notice when Lucien begins to fret, wide awake, if the mage takes too long on a journey. They do not notice when Garth’s lines begin to pulse in tune with Lucien’s heartbeat as they drift off to sleep. They do not notice the heat in their arguments, the blaze in Garth’s eye or the flush of anxious colour in Lucien’s cheeks. The look of betrayal, of fury _so_ pure and distilled it could only be sprung from a deep well of emotion, on Garth’s face when Lucien’s intent becomes all too clear… oh, that is only morality rushing to the surface.

“I want someone to burn with me,” he’d whispered, and the lord’s wish is always the lord’s command.


End file.
